Stevie Ray Vaughan: the lost interview, found
“I remember the first time Jimmie and I played a talent show and we realized in the middle of a song we’d played dozens of times that we’d never ended it before. We knew we had a ways to go.”
Music
25 Sidebar: More Notorious Than Significant
An addendum to the 25 Most Significant and/or Notorious Nights in Austin Music History.
JFS: The Bay City Holy Rollers
**** September 2005: Hurricane Rita is threatening to postpone the fourth annual Austin City Limits Music Festival. At the last minute, the 180 mph winds uprooting trees near the Gulf Coast take a turn before Central Texas, and, instead of a storm, Austin gets a heat wave, with temps reaching 108 degrees. Just past noon […]
End of the Century: Liberty Lunch July 31, 1999
By Michael Corcoran 7/15/99 Austin American Statesman IT’S ONLY A BUILDING, and an ugly one at that, with bathrooms that would’ve been an issue at the Geneva Convention and a hippy dippy mural dominated by a pouring coconut. It’s just a building, yes, but for the last 20-plus years it’s been a structure where musicians […]
Death of a Mailman
From 2014 Bill Martin, who married into the Franklins, Austin’s first family of gospel, delivered good news. The night before East Austin’s legendary gospel announcer and promoter Bill “The Mailman” Martin was laid to rest at age 81, there was a musical memorial at the St. James Missionary Baptist Church on MLK pastored by his […]
AC/DC is the world’s greatest rock n’ roll band
By Michael Corcoran originally published in Jan. 1996 Most people who were alive at the time remember where they were when Kennedy was shot or when they heard that Mike Tyson had been knocked out by Buster Douglas, but for me an equally indelible time and place was that warm, sunny day in 1977 when […]
Gilbert Askey 1925- 2014
by Michael Corcoran Gilbert Askey left Austin for good at age 17 in 1942, but the former Motown arranger, who received an Oscar nomination for his work with Diana Ross on “Lady Sings the Blues” and had a part in “discovering” the Jackson 5, said Austin has never left him. I interviewed the trumpet man, […]
Meet Paul Oscher, one of the two greatest 1960’s era Muddy Waters harmonica players who live in Manchaca
The sign outside Railroad BBQ in Manchaca says, simply, “Live Blues.” It’s Tuesday night just past 7:30 and a family of four chucks their Styrofoam cups on the way out of the smoke-perfumed establishment. Outside, the father says, “that was pretty cool”. “Yeah, that guy was good,” adds the daughter, about 20. They check the sign on the way out for a name and then drive away, unaware that they’d just been eating brisket and sausage to Muddy Waters’ former harmonica player Paul Oscher.
Bobby Blue Bland and James Cotton are brothers?
In the New York Times obit for Bobby Blue Bland, who passed away in June 2013, it says that Bland discovered, not too long before his death, that he and James Cotton were half-brothers. Born in 1930, Bland was fathered by I.J. Brooks, who then abandoned the family. Cotton was born five years later in […]
The New Sincerity- Spin magazine 1986
(Written the year before SXSW) For most people who’ve even bothered to consider it, Austin music is Stevie Ray Vaughan, PBS’s Austin City Limits, the Fabulous Thunderbirds, Willie Nelson, Joe “King” Carrasco, Jerry Jeff Walker and Joe Ely. But then most people think New York City is only Manhattan. If Thomas Wolfe were an Austinite […]